New binary black hole mergers from the public LIGO-Virgo O3 data

The detections of binary black hole (BBH) mergers have allowed us to probe many fundamental questions related to physics and astronomy, such as the validity of general relativity in the strong-dynamical field of gravity, measurement of the expansion rate of the universe, inference of merger rates across cosmic time and so on. As the size of the catalog of detected events increases, the precision of these probes improves correspondingly. It is therefore important to adopt analysis techniques that maximize the yield of existing data. In this talk, I will first briefly walk you through the techniques our (IAS) search pipeline uses to discover such systems and then present some new candidate BBH mergers that we find in the data from the third observing (O3) run of LIGO-Virgo detectors. I will conclude my talk by discussing the properties of these new mergers and exploring how they could contribute to enhancing our understanding of the astrophysics of these systems.